Abstract:
Last month, the team unveiled a breath sensor that is able to instantly determine whether a person is suffering from type-one diabetes. 'The breath is made up of a mixture of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen and water, along many other volatile substances that exist only in very small amounts,' said Sotiris Pratsinis, a professor of particle technology at the Institute of Process Engineering at ETH Zurich.

According to Pratsinis, the sensor could help patients monitor their condition before it gets to a critical stage. 'This is an exciting development,' he said. 'Right now, we're using blood samples, which is quite a primitive method. There are plenty of other bodily fluids that could be analysed and we haven't taken advantage of that because, up until now, we just didn't have the appropriate analytics.'